Path of Exile 2 is a huge hit, breaks 459,000 peak players at early access launch

Path of Exile 2 releases into early access as a verified hit on PC, breaking more than 450,000 peak concurrent players on Steam.

The year of RPGs just keeps on giving as Grinding Gear Games today kicked of Path of Exile 2's long journey into early access. The game has been received well so far, but it's not free-to-play just yet: Users can buy early access to the game starting at $30, giving them a more direct stake in helping shape Path of Exile 2 over time.

Despite the high numbers, the launch hasn't been perfect. Massive popularity means massive strain on the servers. Path of Exile's online infrastructure buckled under the weight of interested gamers and the servers crashed throughout the day.

In a recent video, Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers outlined Path of Exile 2's success but also warned players that they should expect some waiting time throughout the early access weekend.

"We've just passed 1 million redemptions of Path of Exile 2 keys and sales are still increasing. Obviously, this is great news, but it also comes with some downsides too. There's probably going to be some queues during the launch weekend,"

"We really didn't expect to have more than 1 million people online at the same time. We've already ordered way more cloud capacity and those servers will be coming online very soon.

"We frankly don't know how our backend will handle going over 1 million users. We're really not sure what kinds of limits we might hit. We never expected things to grow this big during early access."